Leonardo Takes Wing

Playing the hero of Titanic, James Cameron’s monumental $200 million love-story-within-an-epic, Leonardo DiCaprio found himself hoisted on hydraulic cranes and, surrounded by 200 extras on bungee cords, ﬂying above a 17-million-gallon water tank. Tracing DiCaprio’s rise, Cathy Horyn squares the contradictions of a Hollywood heartthrob who still lives with his mother.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s epic year began down in the heat and gringo badlands of the Baja, where James Cameron filmed Titanic, his ultramarine romance, on 40 customized acres by the sea. Titanic is one big boat, a $200-million-plus, high-tech period piece, floated by two studios with a cast of a thousand, a 775-foot-long replica of the ship, and an open-air tank vast enough to capture the illusion of the ocean’s calm—all at a cost likely to exceed not only that of Waterworld but the budgets of Waterworldand Jurassic Park combined.

To call Cameron’s Titanic, which arrives this month, the most ambitious of the many screen depictions of that famously doomed vessel’s iceberg encounter is to make minnow claims. And lest anyone conclude that the crew was lolling around in the Mexican sun or lapping up margaritas at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Taco just off Route 1, Cameron—the boss action director of Hollywood—drove his troops with the mania of the immortality-obsessed. The result is a spectacular achievement, a film that is intimate and grand, turbulent and beautiful, but—above all—breathtakingly realistic. When DiCaprio’s character, dressed in dazzling white-tie, spirits his wealthy new love to steerage for a rambunctious evening that ends in the backseat of a stored Rolls, he becomes a star of the first order and the exuberant heart of the picture.

But how was Leo to know? When he arrived in Rosarito, he had already spent four months in Mexico shooting William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a racy reprise that hit No. 1 on the Variety list and drew on his audacious acting, as well as those romantic looks—the slacker torso, Keatsian visage, and drooping blond forelock—which have made him catnip to budding teenage girls. But in Rosarito, the 23-year-old star and inveterate complainer was seriously considering whether next time he ought to factor in a film’s location before signing.

“Botswana? Fine,” he’d say. “But I was in Mexico too long.” He was sick of the brown land, the mariachi merriment, and Cameron’s big tub. Even more fatiguing was the endless drone of how Titanic would catapult him, a baby-cheeked rebel who barely shaves, to the status of leading man. And though he admired Cameron, and liked his role as the cocky artist who steals co-star Kate Winslet’s waterproof heart, DiCaprio instinctively saw himself as someone other than a big-time, big-budget star who could be hailed on street corners by just … Leo!

His reservations didn’t sink as workweeks hit the 70-hour mark and he bobbed through the water scenes he had detested from the moment he first edged catlike into the tank. He missed his life back in L.A. and his gang—the witty Jonah Johnson and actors Tobey Maguire, Kevin Connelly, Vincent Laresca, Dash Mihok, and Ethan Suplee. He missed the horseplay—“you know, normal adolescent high jinks,” as Suplee says.

And so with the same dedicated fondness for comfort and raillery as Dean Martin—who had steaks dispatched from the Sands in Vegas while making The Sons of Katie Elder in Durango—DiCaprio flew in his homeys. “Usually, Leo has in his contract that they have to give him x number of plane tickets so he can have his friends come and hang out,” Jonah Johnson says. Johnson, DiCaprio’s assistant for the movie, recalls the day he ambled over to the set, took a good look at the four soundstages, the 17-million-gallon water tank, the smokestacks rising majestically against the sky, the hordes of extras running around in period clothes … and thought, This is bullshit.

Advertisement

DiCaprio would have chosen a different word (at least with a reporter) to describe the scene, but how could he help but be concerned? All his entrancing qualities—the brashness, the sweet adolescent awkwardness—were about to be given heroic dimension and Hollywood spin … love, innocence, the perils of the sea. DiCaprio, who had confined himself mainly to playing oddballs and misfits in movies such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and last year’s Marvin’s Room, was ambivalent about being seen as “a young Gary Cooper” (Cameron’s take on DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson). At the wrap party in March, Winslet presented him with a thick thermal blanket, in which he buried himself. “After the whole experience,” he says now, “I know it’s really not my cup of tea—all respect to Jim and the actors who do that type of thing.”

In April, DiCaprio flew to Paris for the dual role of Louis XIV and his brother, Philippe, in Randall Wallace’s remake of the Dumas classic The Man in the Iron Mask, with a cast including Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, and Gérard Depardieu. Splendid company—and DiCaprio liked the feeling of returning to familiar territory, playing not one but two extreme characters. The homeboys—Tobey, Ethan, and Jonah—arrived. They partied and hung out with models whom Leo knew from backstage tours of fashion shows. There was sharp banter, and DiCaprio—a mean mimic—perfected a devastating impression of Wallace’s southern pone. (“Um gonna kick your ass, but fuhst um gonna tell yuh a story about my daddy.”)

But it was obvious to all that DiCaprio’s days of casually protecting his anonymity with pulled-down baseball caps were numbered. He had already been chased from the Louvre by 30 squealing girls, who tried to claw the shirt off his back right near the Mona Lisa. Now, as if guided by some mysterious hormonal radar, they were outside his apartment near the Champs-Élysées. Sometimes Jonah Johnson would open a window, look down at their honest, trembling, Polly Magoo faces, and throw water on them. “They loved it,” swears Johnson. If they were like any of the countless girls who come up to his Romeo and Juliet co-star Claire Danes just to touch a hand that touched his, they probably didn’t mind the shower. To them, Titanic or dinghy, he was and would always be Leo the Babe.

The fact is, there are lots of ways to see Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio, but only one matters. Certainly he is the party boy who digs late nights at hangouts such as L.A.’s Sky Bar and who loves trolling for runway beauties. (His longest relationship, about 15 months, involved model Kristen Zang, who formerly dated Nick Cage.) And certainly those who see him as a celebrity treated with deference, rolling up with an entourage or bragging about his perks, tend to dismiss him as just a jerk. And you can’t deny that he’s had his fun with interviewers (as when he sarcastically said in 1996, “Oh yeah, once I became famous, bam, I just dumped my old friends”). Nor can you ignore the daredevil in Leo (who in the midst of The Man in the Iron Mask went racing in all-terrain vehicles with a friend, who broke his fibula), the guy who refuses to rein in his lust for skydiving, bungee jumping, and the like. (“Leo’s no pussy,” says Johnson in defense. “But he doesn’t have a death wish, either.”) Indeed, you might say that he will entertain any reasonable risk to demonstrate that he is still a regular guy.

Advertisement

But—and this is the essential thing to know about DiCaprio—despite the frenzy exploding around him, he remains serenely cocooned in his familiar, comfortable lifestyle. He still lives with his German-born mother, Irmelin, in a ranch house in Los Feliz not far from their old, rougher neighborhood, near the water-mattress motels of Hollywood Boulevard. His relationship with his divorced parents (his father, George, a former comic-book distributor, is involved in his son’s career) is so open that it would read like bunkum if it didn’t appear to be true. Although DiCaprio is a millionaire—his back-end picture deals have brought him “first dollar” returns in the high seven figures—he has a coupon clipper’s sense of thrift, spending his money mainly on computer and video equipment and the occasional sport-utility vehicle. “Leo’s cheap,” says Ethan Suplee. “I feel funny saying that, but I’ve said it to him. But he’ll look for a place in the street to park rather than use valet parking.”

And contrary to his flippant quotes, DiCaprio has not dumped all his old friends. “He’s one of the most loyal people I know,” says Claire Danes. “It’s one of his most marked characteristics.” His friends are all—in their horseplay, truthfulness, and risk taking—his constant reality. As Jonah Johnson says, “Outside the house he may be famous, but inside he’s no longer famous. He’s just Leo the jerk, like us.”

All of which is why, as Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount prepare to roll out their $200 million extravaganza, the only person who remains stubbornly, serenely outside the groove of the big rub-a-dub-dub is Leonardo. “Little does Leo know what’s going to happen when Titanic comes out,” says Tobey Maguire. “I mean, it’s huge. And it’s not going to be just 12-year-old girls watching him. It’s going to be everyone.”

The curious thing is, I actually didn’t want Leo at first,” Jim Cameron says. “Leo was recommended by the studios, as were other young, hot actors.… He didn’t strike me as necessarily having the qualities that I wanted for my Jack.”

Cameron’s possessiveness is understandable; he spent five years researching the R.M.S. Titanic to perfect his vision of the film. In 1995, equipped with a special camera, the director made 12 dives to the site of the wreck in the North Atlantic, filming shots for the movie’s contemporary sequences. He consulted the ship’s original blueprints, obtained from its builders, Harland & Wolff of Belfast, and—on the premise that every picture needs one—contrived a boy-meets-girl story between Rose, Winslet’s tightly corseted Edwardian honeypot, and the strictly steerage Jack.

It was vital to Cameron that Jack be played by someone with big-screen charisma. And that didn’t sound like Leonardo. “But,” says Cameron, “I met him and basically just loved him. He can quickly charm a group of people without doing anything obvious.… The second I met him I was convinced.”

When I first meet DiCaprio he is finishing up a photo session at a dance hall in Hollywood, and chatting with his mother, an attractive blonde who has come by with Leo’s grandmother Helena, whom everyone calls Oma. The thing I notice right away is how natural he is around them. You get the idea there is nothing about himself he has to hide. David Blaine, a magician who is one of Leo’s New York buddies, confirms this: “Leo has a wonderful truthfulness about him. Even just the way he is with his mother and grandmother.” The same is true when he is with his dad. DiCaprio’s pack, in fact, apologetically describe the young actor’s relationship with his parents as corny, or at least not as exceptional. As director Randall Wallace says, “Anybody ought to love their parents. But if you look at what it is about them that he most treasures, you get a real window into who he is. And I’m talking about this goodness of heart and this honesty.”

Advertisement

After DiCaprio changes out of his photo attire and into his jeans and T-shirt, we board a limo furnished for the shoot and drive a few blocks to a piano bar on Vermont Avenue. Outside the Dresden, a couple of onlookers shoot Leo keen glances, but inside, the five or six patrons at the bar are engrossed in a basketball game on TV. We slide into a horseshoe-shaped booth and DiCaprio orders a 7Up. Although he is very handsome, and has the smoothest skin I’ve seen on anyone over the age of four, DiCaprio is not noticeably vain. “He’s probably the world’s most beautiful-looking man, yet he doesn’t think that he’s gorgeous,” says Kate Winslet. “And to me, he’s just smelly, farty Leo.”

And he avoids the Hugh Grant habit of tossing a forelock by securing it with a tiny wire headband. “I’ve been wearing this for many years, since I was 18,” he says. “It’s the most masculine one I could find, the most discreet.”

From the beginning, says DiCaprio, he had doubts about doing “a big-budget, Hollywood movie,” but overcame most of them after meeting Cameron and learning that Winslet was involved. Cameron, very cunningly, challenged his reluctant star by telling him that acting involves more than quirky characters. “Look, in a way, that’s the easy stuff,” Cameron remembers advising, “because you’ve got shit to hide behind. When you’re playing someone who is very clear … you have to make the scenes work from a place of purity.”

Yet nothing could have prepared the cast, which also includes Kathy Bates and Billy Zane, for the grinding pace and scenes of mayhem so chillingly real that at a screening I attended many in the audience gasped. “It was hard to focus, it really was,” says DiCaprio, lighting a cigarette. “I remember how they got one scene ready in about two hours, and all of a sudden I’m being, like, towed up on the back of a poop deck with a harness around my waist. There’s, like, 200 extras cabled on with bungee cords, stuntmen ready to fall off and hit the cushioned girders. And then there’s three cranes around us with huge spotlights. Kate and I just looked at each other like, How did we get here?”

T**itanic is not just a big picture, it is a vastly entertaining one. The contemporary sequences with Bill Paxton as a treasure hunter wrap ingeniously around the 1912 narrative and keep things steaming. Much of the credit also goes to DiCaprio and Winslet, whose sexual chemistry creates a seductive undertow throughout the three-hour saga. And, oddly enough, given his reputation for actorly extravagance, DiCaprio plays Jack with such mesmerizing reserve that it has the effect of making his former cavalcade of kooks seem just sloppy. He is all grown up, a man.

“I would agree that he does look older,” Winslet says. “But I don’t think it’s to do with a change in his face, but rather with a worldly wisdom he would probably hate to acknowledge he’s acquired.”

The change is apparent in real life, too. DiCaprio at the Dresden doesn’t seem anything like that fellow in those previous interviews who might thump the table and go into a skyrocketing idiot voice, say Arnie’s from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?

DiCaprio looks sheepish when I bring that up. “I think I tried to entertain those journalists,” he says. “I wanted to show them I’m a good guy. Really. Look!” He takes a drag from his cigarette and smiles wryly. “Well, that didn’t go over very well.”

If you want to know how fearless Leonardo DiCaprio is as an actor, go back to 1992, when at 17 he was among a handful of teenagers chosen to read with Robert De Niro for This Boy’s Life. DiCaprio had achieved some success, playing a homeless boy in the TV sitcom Growing Pains, but hadn’t really broken into film. Tobey Maguire, who was at the audition, remembers thinking Leo had no chance of getting the part: “He was doing karate kicks in the hallway. He wasn’t serious at all.” Maguire adds, “Leo says, ‘De Niro … wasn’t he in Cape Fear?’ I said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me, dude?’”

Advertisement

DiCaprio says he did know who De Niro was, but hadn’t studied his films. “My ignorance, as Tobey says, was a kind of advantage. Anyway, I stood up in front of De Niro really forcefully and I pointed at his face and screamed one of the lines. Then I sat there and waited for some kind of reaction. I remember De Niro had this smirk on his face, like, obviously [he knew] this kid wanted to come in here and show him that he had guts. Everyone started laughing and I said, ‘What? What is it?’ And, well, the cool thing is that I obviously showed him something.”

According to the well-known story, Leonardo DiCaprio suggested his name to his mother with an in utero kick delivered while his parents were viewing a da Vinci painting in Florence. George and Irmelin, hippies in their day, separated when Leo was one year old, but didn’t divorce until a few years ago. Despite his parents’ marital troubles and their occasional financial straits, Leo’s younger years sound happy. He made his acting debut at 14 in a commercial for Matchbox cars. To keep the young actor away from rough elements in their neighborhood, Irmelin enrolled him in a school in Westwood, about an hour’s drive each way.

“I think what I liked best about my childhood was the repetitiveness of the things we did,” DiCaprio tells me. “I think when you’re a kid, and you do a whole bunch of things, see a thousand different things, it’s all a blur and you really don’t remember anything. But we did the same things—went to the same museums, took the same pony rides—and those things have become locked in my memory as one good experience.” He adds, “My parents are so a part of my life that they’re like my legs or something.… And it wasn’t like they created a false good time—that they went out of their way to show me fabulous things. It was just that they were around and they were great.”

I gather from Leo’s friends that his parents—Oma too—are quite the characters. George, who will be an associate producer on one of his son’s future projects (a drama about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case), is a kind of folk hero in the comic-book world. “Leo’s dad is great,” says Dash Mihok. “Eccentric. An artist. He’s just a really nice man, very giving, very interesting. Hip.… Have you met Leo’s mother? Did she offer you a vitamin shake? After Romeo and Juliet, I stayed at his house for like a month, and his mom, in the mornings, would go down to the nature food mart, and, like, ‘Oooo, Dash, want a vitamin shake?’”

What complicates all this is that, on the one hand, DiCaprio is a regular guy living at home with Mom and, on the other, he is a bona fide star, a sex symbol. At the Dresden, he and I got to talking about his celebrity status vis-à-vis young women he meets in bars, and he said one or two things that struck me as fairly outrageous. He said, “Girls don’t really hit on me, no. I think if a girl wants to talk to me, she’ll talk to somebody around me, but not me directly. I don’t know what it is. They never really approach me.”

From what I saw one evening in the bar of the Mondrian hotel in West Hollywood, DiCaprio’s friends are all courteous and easygoing. And the directors with whom I spoke had a similar reaction to Leo’s posse. “I met them all and I really like them,” says Randall Wallace. “And I’ll say frankly, too, that if I had thought any of Leo’s friends was a bad influence on him, I would have chased those motherfuckers out of there.”

Advertisement

But, says Claire Danes, “they have this very sarcastic, dry, ironic sense of humor that they use to test people to see if they’re real or not.” At first, says the 18-year-old actress, “it was impossible to read them … but finally I learned that whatever they were saying was always the opposite of what they meant. That was the rule.”

DiCaprio doesn’t disagree. “My friends Jonah and Vincent will spend an entire day together and not say one serious thing to each other,” he says. “But it makes the times when we actually do say something meaningful and real just 100 times more powerful.”

As his big year breaks, DiCaprio is in the enviable position of having it both ways—of being a major star and maintaining the life he loves, a millionaire and champion model hound who says his first priority is to buy homes for his parents. He’ll have a cameo as a celebrity in Woody Allen’s new movie, but otherwise he plans to take some time off, partly to avoid the impression, as he says, “of having my face everywhere. Basically I only want to trust my instincts with everything I choose,” he continues. “I want to go with things that have integrity and that I feel I’m doing for me.” He’s saying all the right things.

But you always have to wonder about an actor who mimics every reaction so expertly, who can spell out “charm” with a twist of his eyebrow, who can act effortlessness so smoothly that it seems, well … effortless. There’s a rascal in Leo, a wise guy who always knows exactly the impression he’s creating; he’s good. And he knows it. “I spent four months with him and I couldn’t figure him out,” says Danes. “I still can’t figure out whether he’s really transparent or incredibly complex. I think he’s the latter, but I don’t know.”